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By Anthony Cody.

In my recent research into the 2010 LA Times series on “teacher effectiveness,” I learned that $15,000 was used to help pay for someone to generate the VAM analysis used to create thousands of teacher ratings that the newspaper published. These funds came from a 2010 grant from the Hechinger Institute. Since I have been especially interested in the role the Gates Foundation has played in promoting VAM and other misguided “reforms,” I wondered if this 2009 grant from the Gates Foundation to Teachers College was possibly the source of this funding.

Today I got an answer, from Richard Lee Colvin, who was then the Director of The Hechinger Institute, and now works for the US Department of Education under John King. He told me by phone that the source of the $15,000 was a pool of funds that included Gates money, but also included grants from the Broad Foundation, Ford, Carnegie, and others. There was not, according to him, any direct line from the Gates Foundation to this grant of $15,000, and the decision to provide this funding was made independently, by staff at Hechinger, interested in promoting good journalism.

So there you have it. The VAM analysis used by the LA Times to rate the effectiveness of thousands of teachers was partly paid for by a conglomeration of corporate foundations that included the Gates Foundation, among others. The Hechinger Institute was interested in what the test score data would show, and provided the funding, but did not endorse the publication of teacher names their funding made possible.

So we are left with the task of figuring out if this represents anything harmful, in an ethical sense, to the integrity of journalism and the public interest.

We have assurances from everyone involved that there was no direct influence. Nobody at the Gates Foundation told The Hechinger Report “When we give you a grant to support education journalism, here is a list of stories we want to see.”

The grant money to any one project is not directly linked to any one funding source. There is an intermediary that receives the funds from multiple sources, and then disburses them to projects deemed worthy.

If we look back to 2010, when the $15,000 grant was awarded, intense focus was being placed on the concept of teacher effectiveness by the Gates Foundation. They had just launched the Measures of Effective Teaching project, to try to determine how to identify and reward good teachers, and remove bad ones. They were spending a huge amount of money and energy on what Education Week would later call their “teacher agenda.” They were funding the National Council on Teacher Quality, which was pressuring schools of education to emphasize test preparation when preparing teachers of the future. They were funding advocacy groups like Teach Plus and Educators for Excellence, who prepared teachers to go testify at state capitals in favor of including test scores in teacher evaluations. High ranking Department of Education officials had come over from the Gates Foundation, and the Race to the Top grants were so closely aligned to the Gates agenda that the Gates Foundation staff was offering states assistance in completing their applications. NBC News was gearing up for the first week-long Education Nation series, also sponsored by the Gates Foundation. And Waiting for Superman was heading for the movie theaters, with a $2 million promotion budget funded by Gates.

So this was the backdrop that set the stage for the interest that leaders at the Hechinger Institute had in discovering what test scores could reveal about teacher quality.

I take Richard Lee Colvin at his word that the Gates Foundation did not pull any strings to direct the funding towards the LA Times VAM project. In a way, they did not need to do so. They had already sowed the field with seeds for this sort of project, through a hundred other projects. This created a sort of elite consensus that we had a huge problem with teacher quality, that teacher evaluations were ineffective at getting rid of bad teachers, and were flawed because they took no account of student test scores. So it is no coincidence that at the very time Gates advocacy on all these fronts was reaching its peak, leaders at the Hechinger Institute got so curious about what the test score data could tell us about teacher quality..

Journalism is in dire straits in the digital age. Newspapers like the LA Times, which once got a lot of revenue from advertisers, now struggle to support their newsrooms. And the state of the public schools does not compete well with other stories. So into this funding void, corporate philanthropies have stepped, providing millions of dollars of steady income for major outlets like Ed Week and The Hechinger Report. When concerns are raised about this, the main defense offered is that no one source of funding is involved, and thus there is no possibility that the projects are being influenced by the particular goals of any one funder. To respond to this, I would note that while the Gates, Broad, Carnegie and Ford Foundations are indeed distinct organizations, they tend to collectively support the corporate reform agenda in education. Thus leaders of non-profits wishing to do work that will be appreciated by these funders will tend to echo and embody various aspects of that agenda, and will not succeed long if they do work that pushes back against the reform project.

In my previous post on this issue, I asked journalism ethicist Peter Sussman for his views, and he offered this suggestion:

Ultimately, I would argue, there must be a neutral screening and anonymizing organization to insulate journalists from funders with agendas. I am thinking of something like the National Endowments for humanities and the arts, which insulate artists and scholars from any political influence that might come with public funding. Journalists ideally wouldn’t be able to identify the source of money disbursed through a go-between organization or the editorial approach it must take to meet grant criteria. Meantime, news organizations that take money from nonprofits to cover areas of controversy and especially when the funders have taken positions on those issues will continue to jeopardize the trust of their readers, with good reason.

You could argue that The Hechinger Institute and Editorial Projects for Education, which publishes Education Week, have created something close to what Sussman is suggesting. They are independent organizations which receive philanthropic grants and use these funds to pay for independent journalism. But how truly independent do their funding sources allow them to be? What revolving doors are in place that shift leaders from these nonprofits into positions in government and corporations? How are the leaders and advisors of these organizations selected, and who do they represent? Where are their salaries coming from? Are the wishes of the funders balanced by views from other stakeholders who lack the power of the purse?

Here are my earlier posts on this subject:

In September of 2010: The Media’s War on Teachers.

June 4, 2016: LA Times Criticizes Gates and Deasy, Forgets Own Role

June 6, 2016: Was LA Times Practicing Independent Journalism When they Ranked Teachers?

June 8, 2016: Is Funding Transparency Enough to Prevent Billionaire Influence in Education Journalism?

Author

Anthony Cody

Anthony Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years, 18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding member of The Network for Public Education. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San Jose State University, he now lives in Mendocino County, California.

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